Birthright
by love-cerise
Summary: Maybe foresight could change what they never had chosen for themselves. Alanna can't say why she recalls a life she never lived. And Thom can only remember, but not change. AU. Convent fic. Time-travel.
1. Divergence

1. Divergence

Thom (formerly of Trebond before he died) wasn't sure if it were spite that prompted this particular decision to go back in time. Or on the other hand it could also be attributed to the innately human want to relive his life once more, and amend everything.

Or maybe, it was just spite. That and vengeance.

_They _whom judged, _they_ whom passed sentence on what they were wholly ignorant of, _they_, those faceless statistical entities that made up Tortall- they had underestimated him and his Gift, and he would prove them wrong once more.

It wasn't atonement, getting the chance to do everything over. In fact, he felt even less inspired by that.

It was compensation, for a life not lived, for the many infinite, irredeemable, recondite choices that had never been foretold nor had what would have been the saving grace of being questioned by a more experienced and more powerful person than his young teenage self (not that there had been any of _those_ around whom didn't question his motives or sanity).

It was the beginning of a long, long requiem for the paths not taken and then paths that should have never been trodden by any being, least of all himself.

Although_ that_ in itself was more an impulse on his own part rather than a finished product of thoughtful meditation; He'd always been reasonable, and it was as good a time as any to begin disputing that part of his reputation, being Trebond to the core.

Reason: his twin- unforgivable, almost, in her good luck- had none. He did, probably having been alloted by Mithros her portion of it as well as his own.

She couldn't be coolheaded, not when everything teetered on the precipice of war to be decided on a chessboard upon which she was only a pawn. Not when her own friends were on the front lines, and he couldn't name all of them simply because she had given too much of herself to too many people, inasmuch as she claimed to have wanted to always keep herself for herself and not promise it to any man. (Of course, she'd been only talking about romance like that.)

And still, even with the Gift that surpassed all brawn that she could have mustered, Thom couldn't have compensated for the greater powers of charisma and strength and loyalty. He wasn't supposed to have sickened. And the irony, that he finally couldn't resolve a problem, and that something he raised had come to haunt him, oh the thrice-damned irony! Of having his own Gift turned against himself, the poison from his corrupted magical core- the core that made him himself because there was _never_ anything or would there be anything for him other than his Gift-that slowly infused his physical being. And then there was the zombie sorcerer that leeched away at it, but that was something else altogether.

All in all, in the grand master scheme of things he wasn't supposed to wind up _dead. _

Or something just as unpleasant along the lines to that effect, although at the moment it wasn't so much his physical state that Thom was worried about than his mental.

After all, one didn't try to attempt to time travel every other day, especially when one was incapacitated of the ability to even breathe. Being dead tended to do that to him.

Even for such a vaguely defined and volatile thing of the supernatural like magic- there were transgressions for the Gifted to avoid. The word 'taboo' never had meant much to him, even when it was irrevocably linked to interesting topics such as necromancy and chimera-breeding that were in no way covered in the general curriculum for mages.

And then there was _time-travel. _

That most elusive and longed-for wish for malcontents not quite happy with the life they'd made for themselves, a matter consisting entirely of had-beens and what-ifs, all backed by no reason other than the fallible logic of maybe. (Although Thom remembered the unhappy circumstances of his latest experimentation with necromancy...)

Duke Roger had tried his best to disburse Thom of the notion when both of them were still alive, although the young mage had noticed that he had said little about his resurrection, which by all accounts should have also been beyond human grasp.

(Neither had Delia: all parties had been more-or-less satisfied with the results of the necromancy procedure, especially Thom and his ego, and they weren't going to bicker over such petty insignificances in the past.)

"Time-travel, you ask?...It's entirely impossible, for the most part." His Grace had informed him curtly not a month before his imminent demise at the hands of one lady knight, citing several aging resources from one of the tomes in his massive archives. "Bending the fabric of space and time- even with the Gift, that is not achievable. You do realize that paradoxes could occur, and you'd be creating a sort of warp that could affect the entire world?"

"And if I did?" Thom had answered coldly, taking a shuddering sip of bourbon from Alex's private stocks that came straight from Tirragen. The man-at the very least when he was still alive- was as good a liquor connoisseur as he was a swordsman, even if the former quality wasn't exactly publicly known to anyone other than Roger and Thom.

Delia- she had been overly groomed as usual, wearing a dress with a lacy flounce in her trademark green- had gotten baffled and left the room with glazed eyes under the pretense of having to 'freshen up,' as she and Josiane always did when Roger and Thom discussed the Gift in depth. Heck, even Alex found an excuse to leave when the two of them talked magic.

"You could have spacetime rip itself apart in resolving an irresolvable, contradictory conclusion. You have heard of that hypothetical 'Grandfather paradox,' haven't you? If you went back in time to kill your grandfather so that your father wouldn't be born and thusly neither would you, and yet you are still alive in the past..." The handsome duke shook his head, his big hands waving around in the air as if to punctuate the point.

And since when did Roger care about anything other then the throne of Tortall?

Thom remembered the exasperated sigh that the elder man had gave at his response, and that telltale twitch between his eyebrows that meant that he was getting a headache, something normally induced solely by Jon and his infuriating tendency not to die. And then there was his sister and the green-eyed goddess who had chosen her...

...He'd think about Alanna later. And what to do with her, second time around if it ever occurred. As much as he loved her, he had way too much experience with she and her inconveniently meddlesome tactics.

"If you purposely meant to create a warp- well, that would involve the...manipulation of the dimensions. And then there's you as a person to deal with." Roger had been in a pensive mood that day, as could have sufficed to be seen from his willingness to ponder that usually only came after a dip in the brandy from Delia's medicinal cabinet. "There's the principle of self-consistency-"

"As in, I would have to mess around with it. Is there any way to ensure not screwing up in an unfortunate way? And that doesn't involve accidentally depositing myself two thousand years into the future in a fit of trial-and-error? Or some other just as unpleasant harm to my person."

He could imagine inconveniently forgetting to warp his heart along with the rest of him to another time.

"Let's avoid the word 'travel,' Thom."-Well, that eliminating warping anything. "-It only implies spatial movement. And then, there's your physical form and what you'd want to do with it."

"As in, would I have to somehow transport my entire body somewhere sometime else. What if I intend to just insert my consciousness into that of my former self in a past time?" Thom snapped.

"...If you put it that way. There isn't a foreseeable way of calculating the myriads of possibilities that could have happened, the many choices that you'd have tampered with. If you as a person exist already in the space of time- well, as relative as that is- that you want to...insert yourself into, I'm not exactly sure what the consequences would be. If you'd have to juxtapose yourself upon the person you were during that time, or would you become an interruption, something newly introduced into that time as a entirely different variable that is capable of ."

"..." Thom had hummed thoughtfully.

"The latter goes against all the laws of conservation that I know of. Of course, the Gift is the Gift, and physics is physics, but it's still energy of a sort. Theoretically they'd still be one and the same, only from different sources." Duke Roger had reminded him with no little chiding.

"And what where would gravity come from? It's magic." Thom growled sarcastically in retaliation.

"And it's not invincible, magic or not."

Tough words, Thom thought in retrospect, coming from a man who had made his career off the power of his Gift and saw its strength as his birthright to something greater.

"I suppose you can't just contradict those- some sorcerer two thousand years ago did experiments regarding the nature of the Gift itself, or rather source of it...while somewhat unfinished, the evidence that he had managed to discover suggests that the Gift itself flows very much like any other earthly force, inasmuch as it is-" Thom had remembered pausing, digging around for the right word.

"Out of the ordinary." Roger was given to the tart euphemisms of court nobility, after all.

"-witchcraft. Coram says that. But it still has to obey the theoretical give-and-take." Thom had said, giving Roger a look. "While we Gifted could circumvent most rules of common sense with for example abilities like Alanna's healing Jon-"

Roger had scowled. Twirled his wizard's rod around and around and around in big, powerful hands that were more than capable of snapping a grown man in two. No doubt he had wanted to do that to a certain nephew with the tenacity of a cockroach.

"-the fact remains that we have to draw the force from our own bodies, and thus we are drained."

"-That still says nothing about the source of the Gift itself- it only observes its behavior, which is akin to...momentum. Energy. And it's certain that it could be unpredictable at the very best."

Sometimes, Thom wondered just how Duke Roger had managed to cultivate such a formidable reputation as a mage. Part of it could be ironically attributed to the complacency and elitist narrow-mindedness that normally accompanied genius.

"Time-travel would mean going against the natural procession of things, and if we were to superimpose the present upon the past, or rather just a little portion of, namely one single person or thing..."

"So I'd take it that you want to go back in time?" Roger had commented, with his normal unsettling capacity to magically guess one's thoughts, no pun intended. "No doubt you'd like to cause a couple of paradoxes, to change things around. But who's to say that you retain your existence as a person now? As you are now, you may merely revert to whom you used to be without nary a bit of knowledge of the future- we can't tell."

"Just a thought."

"The fact remains that it's impossible without divine intervention. Even we mages cannot defy the rules of the universe." Roger assured him, almost bitterly, with none of his usual charm lurking in his brilliant eyes. "Or otherwise we'd have ruled the world long ago."

That was the last time Thom had ever spoken with Roger, although from that one conversation he learned more than he ever did. _Divine intervention_- choice words, even if they were meant as a joke of sorts.

Screwing around with the innate properties of the universe went well beyond any mortal's abilities without the aid of some otherworldly deity that looked favorably upon wrongdoing or at the very least had tolerance for it and/or were easily amused by the actions of pitiful human beings below on the earth.

And _now_, Thom had an opportunity for a face-to-face encounter with one of said deities.

Of course, he hadn't quite planned on _dying _first, but where there was a will there was always a way.

But to fully realize in all its implications of what he had lost in death, was something that was suddenly upon him in all its full magnitude as Thom of Trebond _panicked_ at the consciousness fleeing his body and all sensation- even pain, which he'd never appreciated until he lost the ability to feel- deserting him. Especially how he wasn't so afraid of dying as he was of merely not living, not being able to immerse himself within his studies and everything familiar.

And then the world stopped crumbling before him, and he knew that the Black god was arriving to take him away.

"...I propose a deal." He said, addressing the hulking shadow figure of a hooded man that had came to claim him.

_How terribly amusing. A deal, with a mortal. _

The death god, by Alanna's word, seemed to be one that was quite accepting of interference from the living as she had positively attested to from having met him at least twice, the first time to reclaim her prince's soul.

"I have nothing to lose- I'm already deceased, obviously." Thom said carefully.

And then realized that that quality would make him by default the property of the god that held the dead in servitude until the end of time. And thusly it went against all strains of logic to try to escape being dead.

_A bargain, say you? _

"My sister came before you, once, and took one marked for the afterlife back to the living with her." Thom reminded him coolly.

But that had been Alanna. And being the unusual girl she'd been all her life, she defied all logic and gender expectations, as well as had the patronage of a goddess to smooth her way.

_It was not her time, nor was it that boy's. _

Thom grimaced. Debating the issue of what consisted of a proper time to die was not high on his list of priorities, since one could never successfully argue metaphysics with a god and not be trounced on every point.

"But still, no doubt you would have liked to have kept them- I see that neither of them have turned up yet."

Although Thom suspected that the Death god would have to go see one Alex of Tirragen soon, if his soft-hearted, idealistic sister managed to overcome her conflicted feelings over fighting against her former friend and rival.

"War-even the uprising such as the one currently occurring in Tortall as we speak- it is...profitable for your particular realm, is it not? It exponentially increases the population here, as I have observed while living. And I daresay that increased thrall increases the influence you have upon the sphere of those still living-"

Thom paused, quickly trying to establish within his mind just what he was attempting to play off on. To quickly make a definition, some preexisting reason to strengthen his motive and to organize an entire argument around. He wasn't quite certain that immortals possessed human flaws like greed and envy that provided loopholes.

"-but I do notice one caveat to your power. The fact that you cannot go and claim those whom you will, not until they stop living. You cannot influence their choices, you have no say in the actions of the living- because you are death itself."

_Eventually, all fall within my thrall. _

"The living are not yours, not yet. It is more often that _men_ cause their own demises, rather than you going to claim their souls. No, it must be that a dagger, a fistfight- all by the hands of _men_-takes lives, leaving you their souls in the aftermath as spoils. You cannot be proud, death, not when it is men and not you responsible for their passage into your realms."

The deity was silent. Although the amusement was gone.

"-And so I propose a bargain to amend that such fault." Thom said quickly, to strike while the metal was still hot with the inflammation brought up by the point he had made. "I, unlike you, can influence the living. You must wait for them to...well, die, kill each other off. I can directly cause them to do that, or I can even send them to you."

_You cannot. Because you, too, are dead. _

"That'd be the rub, wouldn't it?" Thom said pointedly. "I'm dead. But that could be easily amended, wouldn't it. I've accomplished that, once before, in resurrecting Duke Roger. If a mere human like me is able to do that, no doubt you can. If I was alive, it'd be a completely different matter altogether to be able to influence the world."

_You wish me to return you to life? _

The loud growl that seemed to emit from the shadow was not something that Thom thought could pass as laughter.

"No. I just wish you to turn back time, to when I was still alive, so I could start a war with the Scanrans a few years earlier." That was as close to an excuse his mental processes were able to take him. Thom conveniently didn't mention that he had his own reasons of self-fulfillment to his request. "Technically speaking, I'd assume that such a strong deity as you can accomplish such a trivial thing."

Actually, it wasn't so much trivial as risky, as it would be reintroducing infinite variables back into play, allowing once more for choices long made to be reconsidered, and multitudes of possibilities to occur. Of course, hopefully everything would proceed as it had done in his first life- with the exception of what he changed with his knowledge of how the future would be otherwise.

"Hypothetically, I'd be creating a parallel universe in a way, since I'd be doing things differently and thusly be making a divergence from what had been."

Divergence. That was an excellent word.

Thom wanted, specifically, to remain in the plane that he had used to exist in, abet just in a different time. "Of course, I'd have to retain being the person I am now to be of any use- in mind, if not body, if I am to be...taken back to the past. It would be a dually beneficial thing- I live once more, and your halls of the dead will be fuller than ever. We both mutually benefit from war, you see. And if we can overwrite the present- well, I'm sure you understand."

The death god did. _So you intend on using your knowledge of one life to aid you in your second. _

Everything pivoted upon that provision; That Thom himself would in his second life be capable of what he wasn't in the first. Of course, his mind would contradict the child's mind he had at ten or twelve...

"That would be roughly what I plan to do, if all goes well. So do we have a deal?"

_Why? And why would you raise what your kind has always tried to stamp out?_

The immortal deity seemed genuinely, sincerely bewildered, as out of sorts as he'd ever believed an all-powerful, omniscient thing to possibly be.

"We don't stamp out war; I'm not even sure we strive for an end. We rather encourage it, because the oversized egos of our rulers need boosting, which comes by winning conflicts." Thom grumbled.

_Why wish you so much to live once more? To experience pain and suffering within the restrictions of a terrestrial form- something that will die again? Your typical mundane, tertiary body with all that can potentially trouble it. _

"The fact remains," Thom said patiently and truthfully, feeling a migraine coming on. "The fact remains that I don't want to die yet." His voice wavered, as tremulous as he would ever noticeably allow in anyone's- including a god- presence.. "There is too much that I haven't accomplished yet- and I'm sure that what I have to do can benefit you in some way. What I mean to say is that I live again, and in the process you get more people. Deal?"

Blunt, artless, and...surprisingly useful? The Black god actually seemed to be considering the notion, if the bobbing of his hood seemed to be indicate deep pondering. Thom resolved to develop more straightforward communication skills, preferably more civil than those George was inclined to use and less witty than young Naxen. And certainly unlike his impulsive twin.

The first course of action once he returned to life was to start a war to ensure that the black realms would increase its populace, which was really a chore best left to more morally ambiguous, chronically dissatisfied scoundrels like Roger, whose one-dimensional, banal obsession with the throne should be realized in the next life, if for the sole purpose of fulfilling Thom's bargain with the black god in that Roger's reign in Tortall would be a very bloody one and Jonathan wasn't a warlike sort (and therefore had to be eliminated).

Now, if he could only wrap his head around that.

The banality of Thom's earthly ambitions did not escape him for all its stock upon temporal delights like knowledge and the power of his Gift, only accessible while living; Nor did the selfishness of his wish to have one more chance at life at the expense of the people whose lives would be most definitely...not improved second time around for obvious reasons there.

And the next thing he remembered was regaining consciousness, in a fief he'd deserted, facing the anxious face of a sister he hadn't spoken to in ages. Familiar violet eyes, so much like his and yet not- they weren't identical anymore, not in his past life. She'd lost that innocence and hardened, and he'd hardened, just hardened and withered away.

An adult in a child's body. As much as he'd appreciate the opportunity to make sure certain things didn't happen, he'd have to inadvertently go through puberty a second time. Which was not good, considering that the process of growing up had not been kind to him, especially to his skin. He did not look forward to the duration of two years or so when he had resembled a walking infestation of acne.

Thom sighed, braced himself for facing Alanna's worry and what would come in the years to come.

His sister didn't disappoint, intrusive and overbearing in her worry: "What were you thinking of, drawing back so hard on the reins?" She demanded shrilly. "Of course you'd be bucked off!"

Oh. He'd been thrown by a horse. Of course, that'd happened many times in his past in countless riding sessions and he wasn't quite sure just which of those times he had landed in. With satisfaction, Thom noted that he retained the consciousness of just before he died, with the only change being that he was in a much younger body.

He'd need to depend on a small change in the initial condition of the situation, which would cause a chain of events leading to large-scale alterations of events...which meant...Thom steeled himself, not allowing a single trace of calculation appear on his face: Page Thom would have to replace Page Alan when he started attempting to change history.

"Cook made strawberry tarts- shall we go eat them before they get cold?" Alanna suggested now that the danger of losing her twin was a thing of the past. Thom allowed a wistful smile to pass over his face, before replacing it with blankness; Back then, desserts had been a bigger priority and they weren't worrying about surviving a war. Her twelve-year-old self was practically vibrating with excitement of getting her little paws on sugary stuff.

Alanna had always liked sweets, and that hadn't changed- somewhere along the way to being the person that he was, Thom had forgotten that. Forgotten the almond tarts, the cookies, the sponge cake, and all that they had swiped from the Trebond kitchens.

Of course, Alanna conveniently neglected that the tarts were reserved for dinner time only; Snacking in between meals was discouraged.

"I'm sure Cook wouldn't mind us relieving him of such delicacies that would otherwise go to waste- nobody appreciates sweets like we do, anyway-"

And he cringed, at Alanna's wide-eyed stare, so familiar and so curious. He'd forgotten in addition that twelve-year olds, even precocious ones, didn't talk like the adult that he mentally was.

"I mean, let's go get them." Thom corrected himself hastily.

"Thom- for once you're agreeing with my plan!" His sister remarked with all the glee of her former-or rather current-self. "You've never liked to steal from cook. You didn't even want to set that illusion-" Alanna made a grimace, at the mention of the Gift that she feared so much. "-on Godmother when she came to get father to marry her. Goddess knows she needed some sort of reality check, that she can't always get men to fall for her. But no, you'd have to be careful-"

Apparently, he'd also forgotten that he was 'the cautious one' among the two of them.

But that too could be taken care of, in this life.

"It's good to be back. I've missed you." He whispered, to her turned back. _Missed you like this, like this and not like Squire Alan and not Lady Knight Alanna, even if I approved of your getting your shield. _

"...I think the fall really messed up your brain." Alanna told him, stopping in her steps and holding out hands that were smaller and softer than he remembered and already laced liberally with the soft amethyst glow of her trademark healing gift. "Shall I check? In case?"

"No. I'm fine. Remember, the pastries?"

Five minutes, two spilled soup tureens, and one angry cook later, Thom bit into the crispy dessert and grinned at his sister-slash-partner-in-crime, who was currently in the swift process of messily demolishing her crumbly tart and getting it all over her stained frock...under which she had prudently layered a pair of his breeches, doubtlessly nicked from his drawers.

He remembered what happened next, and it did for the second time: Coram lecturing him on horsemanship and Maude then dragging Alanna away in a painful fashion by the ear to change into a clean dress. He'd have to start a civil war or something this time around, but at the very least he would be able to utilize his life to the fullest, starting with the consumption of a treat that he hadn't eaten in ages, not since he left Trebond.

Gods, he'd missed being twelve.

_DEATH be not proud, though some have called thee  
Mighty and dreadful, for, thou art not so,  
For, those, whom thou think'st, thou dost overthrow,  
Die not, poor death, nor yet canst thou kill me.  
From rest and sleep, which but thy pictures be,  
Much pleasure, then from thee, much more must flow,  
And soonest our best men with thee do go,  
Rest of their bones, and souls deliver.  
Thou art slave to Fate, Chance, kings, and desperate men,  
And dost with poison, war, and sickness dwell,  
And poppy, or charms can make us sleep as well,  
And better then thy stroke; why swell'st thou then;  
One short sleep past, we wake eternally,  
And death shall be no more; death, thou shalt die. _


	2. Trebonds, the lot

02. Trebonds, the Lot

It was humiliating.

Coram supposed he deserved it, more or less, although he had given it his best shot and still came terribly short.

It was stomach-turning to have to be subjected to the fate of actually witnessing with his own eyes the sight of the young master missing every blow and slipping out of stance _every five seconds_, as if he was completely ignorant in staff-fighting and Coram hadn't taught him a single whit.

Had he not been a crusty gruff old veteran with a reputation and his dignity to think of, he would have actually broken down in disappointment and _bawled_, right on the spot.

His fellow guardsmen weren't exactly a subtle lot known for their compassion and understanding, and no doubt would have very little hesitation in informing him later on just what (or rather, how little) they thought of his young, scowling charge.

... The only thing that he could say was that Thom could have _feigned_ just a little bit more effort when practicing his staff work, even if he didn't give a damn.

(The only things that he was wholly interested in were magic and Alanna, in only the way a dedicated scholar and brother could be, and that lack of loyalty was detrimental in a tool of the Crown. No, he was inherently not knight material.)

To actively suck badly was one thing. To not at the very least _try _to suck a little less was just....well, downright criminal_. _

He wasn't exactly one to judge his betters, but it was really seven different kinds of stupid, really, although Thom was anything but dim in the mental department given his considerable skills at academics.

Coram stifled a wince of sympathy as Thom's hands on his staff slipped too close together for an effective grip- a mistake that was immediately rectified by the painful cracking of his opponent Satcherell's staff on knuckle and skin.

"Yowch." Thom's voice was unenthusiastic, nearly sarcastic. "Watch it."

His sparring partner stammered a sincere apology, to which Thom replied with a scathing retort of the sort that had made him so disliked among his fellow younger pages and ridiculed by the elder ones.

"Don' ye go mutterin' on, just get on with it, lad." Coram mumbled under his breath, despite the fact that said young master was too far away to hear.

And was it really so necessary to alienate himself from the other pages, who could prove to be good allies for Trebond?

The guardsman could not even muster up the slightest bit of resentment anymore, could not wonder just why the lad was nothing like his peers like that young friendly giant Goldenlake or even slim, dark Tirragen (who really wasn't that much taller or built than Thom was). It was obvious, after all- it wasn't that Thom wasn't able to do anything, it was just that he refused to work at it.

"Trebond! What kind of stance is that?" The training master bellowed in indignation. "Slacking off, are we!"

Cue that infamous, instantaneous, thrice-cursed Trebond pluck in the face of adversity. (Rotten judgment was a frequent accompaniment to that particular trait.)

"Mine own improvement on a common staff-fighting form, sir. Just another variation- isn't that what we're practicing? Variations on staff form."

"Now ye've gone and did it, lad..." Coram groaned to himself.

Trebonds- they were hard to deal with. (Although he didn't remember Lord Alan being so spirited, oh no he didn't. The devil-spawn twins must have inherited it from the late Lady Trebond, bless her good soul.)

It was more Thom's arrogance than anything else, though, and Coram wished that he'd pick up a bit of his sister's spunk instead. Alanna could make a cheeky remark sweet, abet in an awkward way, but on Thom's more eloquent tongue it dried up into a bitter insult.

Such a lackluster performance was not unexpected, nonetheless, and was more than enough to do his teaching shame; It were at times like this that Coram deeply and truly regretted having taking a mentoring role to the boy, if only because no amount of well-meaning instruction could ever beat itself into that scholarly brain of his- a brain that was only good for the infernal runes and logics that were unfortunately a very unnecessary and tiny part of the sort of knightly education his good-for-naught daddy dearest intended him to have.

The blasted boy should have went to university or the monastery. Or should have indulged his academic interests elsewhere in some alternative, _scholarly_ environment that would have properly nurtured his talent where it lay- and that just happened to be in a field that was as far from knighthood as possible, for both Thom's sake and Coram's own sanity.

Still, one could not go long in a rigorous training environment without retaining some of its attributes- although he could positively attest that it was puberty and not hard work that made the boy grow taller and bulk up the slightest bit. The kid did nothing but haunt the library off-hours, and shun the practice courts like he and his sister used to actively avoid bath time at age two.

Parental intentions be damned. (Lord Alan too was more academically inclined to make his insistence on Thom being a knight believable.) His own loyalties, too, inasmuch as Coram balked at going against the higher-ranking. The kid was going to do absolutely no honor to his family in the position that he had been forced into, and Coram truly pitied him for that, despite the fact that he thought that Thom could have actually put a little more effort into his obligations to become a knight.

"Trebond!- stay behind after class for extra work. You look as if you need it."

Being singled out by the training master did little to ruffle Thom, whose bored sigh was more than audible and less than satisfactory, and also serviced to land him an extra two hours with the writing master brushing up on tertiary penmanship skills.

His eyes weren't his sister's, Coram thought at dinnertime, as he watched Thom drop a steaming bowl of chicken broth on a particular young nobleman's foot. Stunning witched eyes that stopped the ordinary observer straight in his tracks with astonishment and/or fear, but still-

"Oops-" Thom's halfhearted apology earned him more lessons, this time remedial sessions with the etiquette master, who was more than vocal on the boy's shortcomings when it came to proper posture. ("Trebond! Don't _slouch_!")

-Granted, the eyes were that same brilliant hue of amethyst, but that were where the similarities ended. There was a disaffected slickness to Thom's askance stare, all glass and winter and elusive seclusion, and Coram wondered, truly wondered just how he had all of a sudden become the polar opposite of his twin in that aspect.

And then there was that nearly accursed intelligence, unforgettable because it was just too prevalent the way it peeked out through jaded violet eyes; The world-weariness as if the boy was truly tired of all the foolish mortals that populated his life- and he had a reason to think so. Coram had always thought that he was much too clever for his own good, and his mind was on a pedestal elsewhere, skywards, elevated somewhere above the petty concerns of others not so mentally gifted.

The guardsman's eyes homed in on the Malven boy (a nasty lad, that 'un, who needed a good thrashing) standing in the serving line behind Thom. His thick hands moved in a quick blur meant to push the younger page out of form. There was that familiar wry quirk to Thom's mouth that Coram recognized as trouble coming home to roost, and then a sheet of fire quickly devouring young Ralon's tunic.

...That Mithros-damned Gift of his.

"Here, I'll put it out!" Thom helpfully emptied a goblet of hot mulled mead on the flailing, screaming boy, which only served to exacerbate the situation.

Ralon wailed, and Gary fetched water, abet at a slower pace.

"Alcohol fuels fire, Trebond!" Duke Gareth told Thom sternly once the flames had been extinguished and Malven escorted by Duke Baird to the sickbay for medical treatment.

"I'm sorry, your grace." The page said innocently, as if he had acted in goodwill. "I didn't know."

"...And just _what _did I say about using your Gift?" Coram mumbled to thin air, glad that there were no magic instructors at the palace that were able to incriminate Thom.

When he heard Thom's door creak in the middle of the night, he moved to intercept, cursing his sleep-stiffened joints. (The boy had always been eccentric- as Thom put it, Maude acted as if she were a chicken and he a duck she hatched by mistake. And what the witch found odd, Coram found downright extraordinary. It made him nervous. )

"_Now_ what are ye up to? " The guardsman asked humorlessly, blocking the boy's path. "Lad-It's restriction to the palace if ye're caught."

"And if Duke Gareth asks, you won't be lying when you say you don't know." The brusque reply was cold and noncommittal, and no doubt purposely vague so as to allow the least limitations. Such a schooled response- the boy was truly evasive.

Thom gave him an unreadable look, as if to ascertain Coram's intentions.

The guardsman still held the door firmly in place.

"You've never had a problem with me going out to do homework, so why now?"

"An' just where d'ye think to go at this time o' night? Don't ye give me that foolery. Ye'd go to do your magicking, right?"

"It's perfectly safe." Thom gave a long-suffering sigh. "It's not as if I don't know what I'm doing."

He believed the latter part. Not the former in any way, though. The lad had set Ralon of Malven on fire, after all.

"Bullocks. A youngling like ye messin' about-"

"Coram. I'm not afraid of my Gift- I'm not Alanna." Of course not. Thom had always had pedantic inclinations towards that particular study, something that his sister had to be coerced and tricked into practicing.

"That ye aren't, sure 'nuff." The guardsman said with a snort, not wanting to sound matronly like Maude and yet wanting to show some sort of rebuke to the wayward young master.

"I'm glad not to be her, afraid of her Gift and learning to be a...._ugh_. You know _what_."

Coram knew very well. With Thom, the subject was unmentionable because it brought up too many proverbial bones to pick with society in general, the many elusive little details that was worthy of the progressive academic discourses and essays on the ills of humankind that Thom and his father were so fond of dissecting.

( Although admittedly Lord Alan of Trebond had distinctively more..._conservative_ tastes than his offspring. _Chauvinistic_, Alanna insisted.)

The distant, regretful look Thom had was genuine; His opinion of convent alumna was not high and his regard for his sister was heartfelt. "She, unlike me, is knightly material- wasted, totally _wasted!_ On that pansy, prissy, ridiculous lady-stuff."

That was a compliment by contradiction, and high praise in the normally acerbic Thom's book. Coram wasn't entirely sure if it were scorn for his sister's sad circumstances in the convent or the career he was supposed to have that made his lower lip twist so with derision.

"And ye, lad?"

"You know I've always wanted to be a sorcerer. Don't hold it against me that I'm doing my best under the conditions that I'm in."

The scathing look that Thom gave him did well to mask irritation and anxiety, and the guardsman knew that he had to concede. He wasn't one to mock such determination, even if he always was uneasy of what lay under that insatiable drive: something deeper and rawer and unsatisfied and something distinctly unpleasant, if Thom's attitude gave any sign.

"Aye, but-"

How to phrase this best? Coram was sure that the page would not take it well if he was bluntly told that he better lie low so as to ensure his continued survival. After all, wayward students were harshly disciplined by the Duke Gareth and their respective subject masters in the palace, and Thom never was one for physical exertion...(And if he failed out, Alanna would give Thom more than an earful.)

"...just don't ye get caught, 'ear me?" The guardsman relented, gruffly.

"Never. "

Coram was left with the sight of Thom's receding shadow, flickering and withdrawing as he scampered off to Goddess-knew-where he saw fit to curl up with an ancient treatise on just as ancient applications of wild magic.

Not that he wanted nor needed to know anything about what the young master was doing in his nonexistent spare time. Some things were better left alone, after all.

At least Thom wasn't going into the city.

-- -- -- -- --

The coolness of the first onset of September gales did very little to warm Alanna's heart towards her situation, especially because it served as a reminder of the beginning of the autumn court season. Even though she was not yet of age to be presented, it was no respite from preparations that were at least a year in advance. There were lists and lists of immensely wealthy, eligible and still ridiculously young bachelors of good birth to commit to memory, so as to allow her the 'greatest advantage' when they and she came of age. The worst about the entire affair was that she full well knew that she had to obligatorily ensnare one of them as a future spouse.

"How lucky!" Lady Patience- fittingly named and normally a nice logical woman unlike the others around her- had exclaimed to her during one of their impromptu meetings in the convent gardens. "The crown prince will be of marrying age when you go to the palace to be a fine lady."

The sad thing was that Alanna had, up until a month ago, had very little intention of becoming a fine lady when she could have been a fine knight.

Now, she could only have traced in her mind what could have been, as opposed to what was at hand, and the only meager comfort she could have was in knowing that Thom was as miserable as she was, if his occasional letters were any indicator.

Now that was a grim satisfaction, if somewhat black in wishing suffering on another. She'd never been a vehement person by nature, but by golly was she reconsidering it.

Contrary to popular belief it was not just all about being and sitting pretty, Alanna reflected grimly over her primer of embroidery stitches on one lazy autumn afternoon in Sewing Mistress Margaux's class. (The fact that what she was learning was going to help her do Trebond proud was no motivation whatsoever.)

The _presentation_ of course was more than relevant (hair/skin/nails/dress), but the mentality of actually being one of the fairer kind was something different altogether. To have a status tantamount to chattel, and still to possess all the hefty responsibilities of a head of domestic affairs in the household- being the lady of an estate would be very trying if it were exactly as advertised by her elder and married off peers (all esteemed convent alumna either with child or planning to be with child in the near foreseeable future). Alanna was glad that there would still be years before she could have to deliberate on her marriage prospects, and proceed onto escaping them altogether.

"....Palestrina family of stitches....left to right.....pearl stitch....reversed Palestrina...." Sister Margaux talked through her slightly aquiline nose. "...Trebond! Don't _slouch_!"

Nope. The convent wasn't exactly notable for its scintillating class discussions. Alanna straightened her back in grudging acquiesce, and looked once more to her books.

The words and sewing patterns described in exasperating detail in the book continued to slip past her consciousness, seemingly floating out towards the line of her peripheral vision as the lull of the afternoon gave way to drowsiness, aided and abetted by the nasal drone of her instructor as well as her innate disinterest in the subject itself.

Of course, Alanna preferred reading about embroidery than actually performing it herself, since hands on application was something that she couldn't yet grasp- although she did have the sneaking suspicion that she didn't have as much of a capacity to retain theoretical knowledge, since she had always preferred actions (actually_ holding_ a bow, as opposed to_ envisioning_ how to put arrow to string) to thinking about how things were to be.

"Lady Trebond! Please demonstrate the Basque knot, if you will."

Basque _knot_? She gulped, having been under the impression that getting her embroidery all knotted up in tangled, unmanageable snarls was a bad thing....

"Lady Alanna of Trebond! We do not have all day."

"..."

"....It's also called the knotted loop stitch." Sister Margaux informed her brusquely, looking vaguely like a menacing bloated....._insect_ in her severe drab mud-brown robes. ("_Fawn! _Not _mud_, Trebond!")

Knotted loop stitch. Knotted loop stitch? Too bad she had just as little clue what that was, too.

"Ummm...I'm sorry?" Alanna asked, trying to buy time before the bell.

"If you had read yesterday night's assigned text, you might just know it." The embroidery mistress sneered through her nose.

Needlessly, Alanna had- and had also forgotten everything overnight. And also managed to rip half--not all---of her rag-curls and pins out in her sleep, culminating in lopsided, unattractive hair with the luster of a slab of rotting wood.

"I _did_ try, sister." She muttered resentfully. "It just really doesn't stick in my head."

"Just like your curlers don't stick to your hair."

....And just _how _was the sad state of her hair relevant in any way to the lesson?

"I blame the bedbugs, ma'am." Alanna said, trying to keep the blood from rushing to her face. "Goddess knows that we have some very vicious varieties of insects in these parts."

_Just like we have vicious varieties of women in this convent_, went unsaid.

The subtleties of her innocent cheek did not go unnoticed, not by such a woman hardened by perpetual court seasons of insinuations, scandals and power plays.

"Enough of your sauce, young lady. No man wants a bride with such an unsavory tendency to talk back."

"Begging your pardon, but I think most men want a subordinate to command."

Subordinate- a big word that Thom would have used.

Alanna was glad that her trained reflexes- while not half her former speed and precision and which would have done Coram shame- were not so dulled by ladylike living so that she couldn't avoid the punishing lash of the riding crop that swished pathetically in her general direction.

The bell rang, and she fled for her break hour, though not quite swiftly enough so as to avoid an extra two hours in dance instruction, to commence later at night when she'd no doubt be sleepy and tired and heartsick, sick, sick, sick of all things feminine. The only redeeming fact was that dance, while being her most unfavorite subject, was the only one she could possibly tolerate because of the instructor.

It was apt that the only instructor in the entire convent that had the stomach for her and her so-called pertness was a lady named _Patience, _of all virtues.

Quite telling, really, considering the fact that said instructor was the only one whose pedagogy was effective enough to teach her the difference between a gavotte and a musette and make her _remember_ all the minuscule little things that set them apart. (A great deal of the success also could be attributed to an abundance of sweets that were always available as rewards.)

"More sugar?" The dance mistress said sweetly during a breather after the long punishment session of instruction, and Alanna continued to add more into her tea than that was good for her teeth. "I won't say anything about healthy eating- not today, since you managed the pavane so well today."

"Thanks. But I dance as well as Lady Josiane of the Copper Isles _fences_."

Sister Patience's kind eyes crinkled in amusement, at the edges where the soft shimmer of teal eyeshadow blended easily (like it should, and how Alanna could never manage) into creamy peach. "I wouldn't say that your ballroom skills are inexistent."

"Alright." Alanna amended. "She can't fence at all, for fear of breaking a nail. My dancing ability is on par with Sister Margaux's sense of humor, then."

"How so? Enlighten me."

"She does have one...sort of. It's usually at my expense."

"And it is your high-spirited answers that get you in trouble, mostly. Child-what am I going to do with you? Margaux is a very bad enemy to make, in this convent."

Alanna contemplated this for a moment, rolling candy over and under her tongue.

Sister Margaux was both savage and sweet in the devious, practical way that only one long accustomed to putting up facades at court was able to utilize to her greatest advantage. The rumor mill- not that Alanna was inclined to pay much attention to it when she wasn't bored to tears-had it that her gentleman admirers had the uncanny tendency to die in duels with each other over her, and as a result Margaux had cultivated a reputation as a literal mankiller that led to her being sent from the court to a convent to live her days out.

That was more than enough to make anyone deeply bitter, especially since a typical lady's highest aspiration was always snaring a man to provide for her the other half of the hereditary material for the next generation. Alas for Lady Margaux, she had done that all too well.

"She hates me." Alanna muttered. Bit down savagely on her sweet with an audible crunch.

"It's not ladylike to criticize your superiors." Patience corrected gently, but Alanna just knew that behind her delicate fan was a small, red-painted smile.

"And it's not ladylike to find faults?" Alanna wanted to know.

"Some gentile people of discerning tastes find that being critical is a sign of having sophistication- possessing good judgment, supposedly."

"Discern-what?"

"Discerning, as in being discriminatory."

"Discrimi-Come again?"

"Being able to draw distinctions. You need to study more, Alanna."

"Oh. I don't mean to be difficult." _Thom_ was the smart, well-read one with the extensive vocabulary and usage to match, not she. And as of recent, he'd sounded unusually sophisticated with big words and all, even for him. What twelve-year old used the word 'prerequisite,' anyhow?

"That's a charm in some ways. I just mean that people find fault with others differ in opinion just for the sake of appearing better- for example, you are criticized by Lady Margaux for disliking ladylike duties."

Now that was the closest to an insult Alanna had ever heard from her about other convent ladies.

"It's...boring?" Alanna suggested. And then flushed in chagrin. "No offense to you-you teach dance well-it's-it's just-"

"For lack of a better word, it _is_ boring if you can't appreciate it the right way."

"I'm unsophisticated and tasteless and tomboyish and stupid- I know." As well as the pseudo-emotional equivalent of a total country _hick_, if the convent ladies' idle remarks on her lack of concern over future marriage prospects were to be taken at face value.

Who was she kidding?- Being from rural Trebond with its acres and acres of woodlands, of course she was considered a tasteless little country hick.

"You're not so dense that light bends around you." Patience said, absently brushing invisible crumbs of cookies off her dress. The blue satin, shirred generously with soft frills of cream, was spotless as always- very much unlike Alanna's own frock of unflattering red speckled with traces of breakfast's jam.

"I'm not dense? And what light?"

"Nevermind you that- they don't teach most women basic sciences, anyhow..."

"Teach women what?" Alanna was curious. "And what does light have to do with me not being dense?"

"Never you mind that, ahem. Back to what we were talking about-It is _culture_- the art of being a lady. You'll acquire it sooner or later; we're not all born able to enjoy the more subtle nuances of etiquette and ladylike duties."

"I'm culturally retarded, then. Or just plainly neurotic." Alanna observed sagely. "I mean- memorizing the lists and lists of eligible young men: Conté- the highest one to aim for. Goody, there's _two_ of them who're unmarried- the crown prince and the duke-"

"You have to admit that the Conté blue eyes are very attractive."

So she _was_ the only one who was certifiably insane, after all. (Some more fanatical women practically worshiped the portrait of the crown prince that hung in the convent's great hall for the purpose of being an object to curtsy to.)

"-Portraits certainly don't do them justice, then. They look like blue specks of paint, no offense to them. Delia will have a field day with them. And my brother's name is somewhere on that list somewhere, I just _know_ it."

"I'm sure he'll do well in securing a wife." Patience said diplomatically, at her frown.

Ha! Do well. Ha. She didn't want to think about Thom- he'd be just more fresh meat for the girls hungry for a match. Trebond as a fief was rather well off, despite the fact that her father was in the long slow process of burying himself alive in his treatises and essays, leaving the estate administrative duties to people like Coram. Which meant that any woman married to Thom had a great deal more jurisdiction; The old lord would no doubt leave everything for his son to manage, and there had been no lady of Trebond for years to contest that.

"Then there's Naxen, Goldenlake, Tirragen, Nond....it goes on and on. The prince's circle atop the list, especially the families that are in the golden book. I feel _bad_ for these boys. And of course, I don't mean to be pert. Although I really wouldn't wish Lady Delia on anyone."

She really wouldn't. She'd put that on the same level as treason to the throne.

"Don't be sorry- it's flattering to them men to be the objects of such-" Lady Patience stopped in mid-sentence. "Never you mind them- just focus on your own prospects."

"Marriage. Men." Alanna sighed. "_Prospects_. Waiting to come of age to get married is like waiting to go to hell in a handbasket. Isn't it depressing? I hate being a lady."

(It was only around Patience that she could be so verbose in expressing her displeasure; Other women in the convent would have scolded her, severely, and brought out the riding crop- a sad replacement for a whip or cane, but hurt just as much.)

"So did I when I was your age. It'll be better later on."

It'll be better. In fact, it was unusual for the woman to be so blunt as she was, and to cut off halfways. Patience apparently did not wish to elaborate on the matter, and Alanna wasn't such a hopeless dunce at reading social cues that she wasn't able to see it. She took that as her prompt that she was dismissed for the day, and left.

Reserved, inhibited- the answer was not what Alanna had been looking for. It wasn't as if she was fishing for sympathy, she thought bashfully to herself as she scampered back towards the living quarters she shared with Maude.

It was more along the lines of wanting to find an ally in such a fine exemplar of ladyship, to become able to believe that there was one other lady in the world who shared her frustration. Perhaps her notions were odd and inflammatory, but it wasn't as if she was interested in inciting revolutionary change in regard to traditional gender roles. Now that, no doubt, would be truly unladylike and she wasn't so sanguine to hope for desired results.

All she wanted to do was become a knight. Not change the entire world. Although she was reconsidering that too....

To fight for the throne and to taste the bitter tang of victory and yet know that it was all worth it- to successfully defeat someone less well trained than her, and to throw up afterwards- to put a suffering soldier to his final and longest sleep with her Gift- to vanquish the last protesting remnants of a child-stealing people that lived in a black city- to become a woman who rode like a man- to even just be at a knight's side and know that she belonged there, as one of them-

-To gaze into the famed Conté blue eyes, to actually realize that they were truly the deepest, purest shade of cobalt, especially when they caught the light just so; when he turned his raven head towards the sun-

Alanna blinked, confused on just how she just _knew._ And what blue eyes?

How _familiar_ she was with those details, and yet how fleetingly they presented themselves in her mind and then disappeared, leaving only disappointing wisps behind of things that she was sure never came true. It was a ghost of a memory that wasn't hers-

"A memory? How strange." Alanna voiced aloud, before thinking that onlookers (there were none, thankfully) might believe that she was not quite right in the head.

Talking to oneself and thinking odd thoughts were not exactly indicative of sanity, and the convent ladies were already convinced that she had a screw loose somewhere, with her typical spitfire fashion of rebelling against norms. Insane as it seemed to be, it was as if her aspirations had made themselves manifest in daydreams; That was all it was, the impossible longings of a girl who denied her birthright as a woman and wanted to be like a man.

But how was she to intimately know, the blood and sweat and tears- or at the very least have a singular, fleeting understanding of it all, as if she had actually experienced her Ordeal firsthand?

It wasn't as if she had been a knight before, anyhow.

----------------------

Chubby was stubborn.

The squared, rigid set of Thom's countenance was just as unyielding; All except for the irritated tick of a nerve on his forehead. He'd never been given towards explosive (and sometimes violent) expressions of fury as he remembered his sister dearest was wont to do at times, but he was seriously reconsidering that tendency.

"Must...write...father...for money...to buy....a....new....horse..." The page grunted to himself, punctuating each word with a particularly vicious tug on Chubby's reins.

No amount of pulling or bribes would have coerced the Mithros-damned thing out of its stall, so he'd resorted to brute force, of which he had precious little of.

For an old hack of farm animal, Chubby was rather relentless in his ignoring of his master's bidding. Despite Alanna's fondness for him, Thom had always been of the opinion that the accursed gelding was the equine equivalent of a stingy old miser. And how in Mithros' name had she been able to control him last time, before she got that mare Moonlight from George? (He'd have to look into that, since he wasn't quite sure if Moonlight would play into any events.) One couldn't tilt- not that he was able to even hold a lance straight, really- on such a weak pony. A pony, not even a horse.

Thom hadn't the patience nor skill with livestock to actually coerce the horse into staying still for all of five minutes so that he could get the confounded saddle onto its back. Sugar lumps and apples had been offered as a bribe and ignored, and his temper was fast approaching boiling point.

"You can't just stay put?" The irate page grumbled, setting the saddle down with an audible thump on the floor before he caught himself.

"Fergive me fo' me cheek, but-Y'can't jus' stay quiet?" A low voice drawled from above. "At this rate, ye'll wake the entire palace up and ye won't be goin' anywhere, much less _out_."

No, if Duke Gareth had his way he wouldn't have many market days for the rest of his page and squire career.

Irritated that he had been discovered, the page glowered skywards at the loft, which was brimming with generous piles of hay that were kissed a cool gold with the moonlight that had infiltrated the stables by way of the open door.

"Stephan, was it?" He asked casually, trying to remember what Alanna had said about the young man. "Don't the hired help keep themselves out of the nobles' affairs, normally?"

"Normally- but George thinks you're worth keeping an eye on for his own reasons, and he'll have our ears if anything happens." The stable boy gave a good-natured chuckle, apparently not fazed by the slight or Thom's assertiveness.

"Your king's an interfering busybody, as good as his intentions are." That much Thom was willing to admit, despite the fact that he'd prefer leaving all acquaintances at an arms' length away. He wasn't so overconfident as to make an enemy of the King of rogues, and one who was also in possession of the Gift and had been Alanna's best ally. The denizens that frequented the Dancing Dover were of dubious character, and he could never know when a potential ally who asked no questions could be useful.

He may never have wanted friends, but never let it be said that Thom of Trebond was one to burn bridges. He wouldn't had been the strongest of sorcerers in his previous life if he had a stupid bone in his body.

"Well, he's taken a shine to ye, what can I say? How's the black eye? That young Malven sure got you a good 'un three nights ago for not curryin' his horse."

"It was _four_. And he could do it himself. Getting punished was _his_ lookout." Thom insisted, feeling an unaccustomed swell of pride bloom in his chest.

Alanna had briefly mentioned Ralon- he kisses pigs, she had unflatteringly declared- in her accounts of the long tedious process of getting her shield, and he'd had more the respect after experiencing up close and personal just what she had suffered through first time around.

The bad thing was, this time it was his turn to get beaten up. He'd underestimated the butterfly effect.

"Aye, aye, and you set him on fire tonight at dinner- but what of the eye? The swelling shouldn't have gone down yet-"

Thom's face was as unblemished as if he had never been struck, the skin over his eye being smooth and light-colored. He hid a grin, remembering gleefully just how Ralon had looked befuddled over why purple flames suddenly licked away in avenging tendrils at his tunic and why Thom's eye hadn't been swollen blue.

"Healed it with my Gift- no need to leave evidence lying around on my face." The page muttered, shooting the other a baleful look at the reminder of the beating. "No one need know that I've been brawling with Ralon- and he's not fool enough to tell Duke Gareth."

Actually, Alanna had said that the bastard _was _a tattletale, but only if Raoul administered a particularly brutal pounding in the first place. Which wouldn't happen. Since in this life, Thom wouldn't have the benefits of the prince's friendship.

"But ye'll be hurting all the time, then." Stephan remarked, with a trace of concern.

"It's good practice for my Gift, since I've ever bothered before with the healing arts."

Alright, so that was a bit of a fib- more illusionary work than actual healing, since the latter was never really his forte and Thom wasn't overly fond of dwelling on imperfections. Thom watched passively as Stephan sighed and slipped down below to pick up the discarded saddle, carefully fitting it over Chubby's head with the ease of someone experienced with livestock.

"Don' ye use the bit too much- an old horse like this-"

"I can handle my own horse, thank you very much."

Stephan shook his head. "I don' suppos ye'd tell me where you're goin'?"

"Elsewhere, of course." Thom snapped. "My manservant knows, so it's all right."

"An' you'll get _him_ in trouble, too. The city?! It's restriction-"

"-to the palace if I'm caught. Which I won't be."

Being twelve years old was irritating in that so-called responsible adults always saw fit to stifle him with rules and regulations seemingly developed for their own convenience of managing wayward kids. And if anything, earning a shield was worse than imagined. The Mithran priests had developed his Gift skills so that it was not unusual for him to show his talent; However, the palace education was unsatisfactory regarding education in that field and if he openly displayed it, he would cause waves that would put him under even more scrutiny that he couldn't afford.

Waves. Would he drown, or would the rest of the world? He'd done it last time, during Alanna's squire years. That wasn't good, so Thom had refrained from openly displaying his Gift.

"...Mithros!" Thom swore as Chubby moved, just as he was going to mount.

"It doesn't like you." Stephan informed him. Chubby flicked its shaggy head in congruity, much to Thom's dismay.

"I don't need a stableboy to tell me that, I already know." Thom muttered vengefully.

As if the riding master- accursed man!- hadn't told him repetitively in the riding classes...which he was failing, as a matter of fact.

However, choosing to go to the palace this time instead of letting Alanna go in his place was intentional on his own part even if it caused him to do exactly what he hated; Alanna had been too much of an obstacle for Roger last time around, and had proven herself to be Jon's most valuable companion, so Thom needed to ensure that she never met the prince and healed him from the sweating sickness.

Secondly, as a lady, Alanna would then be unable of all she had used to be capable of. She would never grow into the formidable lioness that she might have been, as a knight- such an Alanna was too strong an enemy, although the present twelve year old Alanna still retained that same stubborn courage that would have seen her through her page, squire, and knight years. And that quality could be used by him, even if it could never be fully recognized in the shield that she had tried for.

"Stay still this time." He cautioned Chubby as he carefully and awkwardly clambered astride, boots slipping on the stirrups. "Dried horse meat has magical properties, were you aware of that?"

Chubby apparently didn't care about being turned into potion ingredients, because Thom found himself suddenly heading helter-skelter towards the open gates, dashing across the palace lawns and straight in sight of the night watchmen...

He'd eschewed the bright red and brighter gold colors of the uniform for a somber, less detectable black tunic, but that didn't mean that he blended in with the night. Thom cursed and immediately erected an illusion to conceal himself and his disobedient mount from surveillance, easily passing past more-or-less undetected to the city.

"I heard you've been havin' trouble with Malven." George said, once Thom had been settled down with a tankard of lemonade. His face was unreadable, and Thom didn't quite dare to poke at the rogue with his Gift to read his mind for fear of being rejected.

"A more private setting, perhaps. Since I-I have to ask a favor of you." Thom muttered, almost sullen at having to lower himself to asking for someone else's help, especially a commoner, Gifted or not.

"You're proud, young Thom, but you're certainly careful." George murmured, when they were safely within the sound-proof territory of George's rooms, where none would disturb them.

"I made sure no-one saw me leave the palace." Thom said stiffly.

"...An illusion of the sort that you're so fond of, youngster?"

Thom only smiled, not particularly nicely, waving a hand towards the fire flickering in the hearth.

George's brown eyes were glossed with the firelight, and he stood up, squaring his shoulders and shaking his head. "You with your Gift are stronger than I with all my instruments in the shadows. I sensed it, when my Gift drew me to you in the marketplace on your first day in Corus. There's nothin' of the sort that I can help you with."

"My Gift has its limitations, you see. There are certain things that I can't do to certain people." Thom told the rogue.

"Hmph." George only said coldly, eying him dubiously. "A favor, you say. What's it to be? A throat-cutting? Some of my bully boys taking Ralon into an alley for a chat?"

Thom hesitated. He couldn't possibly beat Ralon, not even with George's help, since he was no natural fighter like his twin. "Something along the lines to that, yes."

George's hands slammed down on the table, all of a sudden, causing the entire wooden structure to shudder beneath the force of it and his weight, and Thom knew that he had made the first mistake in his return to life.

"I'd thought better of you, young master Trebond." George said quietly. "I thought ye were wanting for a friend, not a kept rogue?"

Thom snorted. "I don't want a kept rogue. Just a favor between friends. You know as well as I that I wouldn't ask help, normally. I'd ask you to teach me to fight with my fists the way they don't at the palace but...well, you know. I'm not exactly…"

"…The most athletic lad, yes. That ye are definitely not. Some tell me that you're failing all of your classes that don't involve studyin'." George observed drolly, face blank.

"That would about be why I'd refrain from actually fighting Malven hands-on myself. He'd squash me flat if I didn't use my Gift."

George still glared at him, suspicion in his brown eyes. Thom swore inwardly, hoping for his own sake that it wasn't romantic attraction on the rogue's part that had him so loyal to Alanna as it was comradeship. Thom certainly didn't have _that _advantage, nor would he ever want to use it, even if he had.

"I think you're looking for an alive friend, not a dead one." Thom added hopefully.

That was more along of the lines of one of Alanna's cheeky replies, of that kind that had gained her so many allies and friends, even if her obvious lack of tact was somewhat artless and inappropriate at times.

Such an Alanna could never come into existence, for his own sake. (And hers as well, as Thom _tried _to rationalize. She had been hurt, both emotionally and physically, the first time around.)

And that involved keeping her as far away from Corus for the time being, and further away from the events from the timeline that he had been familiar with. If anything, his going to palace was all for the purpose of making sure that his sister did not become a knight, did not heal Jonathan, and did not kill Roger.

There it was, three possibilities sealed with a single action from him: that of refusing to go along with Alanna's harebrained plan that in retrospect really wasn't too much of a harebrained plan at all.

"I'll think about it."

George's answer was noncommittal, but it wasn't an angry refusal by any means. Thom knew when to make himself scarce.

The problem with changing things was that it had the risk of effectively rendering the timeline of events that Thom was familiar with completely useless. Alanna had told him much of her time as a page and squire, but too many things also drew up blanks, things that might have been useful to him had he actually_ known_ about them. Frustratingly, it was point A and point B, but no line drawn in between for his consultation. If he changed things too much from what they used to be, for all his prior knowledge absolutely nothing in his second life would be predictable.

And thereon lay the problem.

It'd already been established that Thom needed to insert himself into Alanna's place in his second chance at life, to make use of the advantages she'd had the first time that had eventually led to her victory. As a novice student at the Mithran cloisters, there was little that he could affect so as to change what would otherwise come about; He to be a page, needed to be near people of influence like the Prince and eventually Roger, and be involved in events so he could change them.

In other words, he needed to become Alanna the way she had been in his previous life. She had been in a position of gaining many allies, and she had proceeded to do so as page, and later squire Alan.

Thom recognized that he was in that same position now, but had to grudgingly admit that he was unable to utilize it as efficiently as Alanna had unwittingly done in the past. There was no charm to his manner; He was aware that he came off as caustic and arrogant to others at times.

This time, he could not gain Jonathan, Gary, and Raoul as friends as Alanna had done, since they not so much disliked him as ignored him. (And no, Thom could not quite be bitter about that especially since he knew too well about what a hindrance friendship could be.) And Ralon- he wasn't even sure if George would deign to teach him how to fistfight, which was how Alanna had ridded herself of that pest.

Alex, however, was a completely different variable at the moment, even if at the moment he sided with the other boys. Alanna had mentioned that she and Alex had contended with each other in swordsmanship, a rivalry that had turned sour and could have been a cause of Alex's defection, although that in itself could just as well be attributed to Roger's immense influence as a knight-master. Without that rivalry to stake things upon―since Thom was well enlightened that he'd never be a good swordsman of any sort―Alex was only an uncertain factor at the moment, and his comradeship in the near future wasn't something that Thom would wait for with bated breath.

As he returned to the stables with Chubby, he began to think that maybe he hadn't changed the timeline for the best, since too many variables were changed all at once. All these values had been different because of his interference, and he lacked many things that he'd nearly assumed came with his being in Alanna's situation. He'd had Gary's sponsorship, but otherwise the elder boy just left him on his own; Thom suspected that he'd had scared off the friendly youth with his straight-talking attitude.

There was too much that he needed to change, and yet so much that he'd had to leave alone to ensure that certain results came about; This was no experiment with multiple trials with an averaged result for increased accuracy, but rather his life and its many possible outcomes that he needed to manipulate.

Seeing that the sun was coming up, he quickly pulled out pen and parchment before Coram got up for the dawn watch. Alanna's letters sounded so miserable, it would only be right that he did his duty as a brother and helped her out, in the process doing himself a favor this time around and sparing himself the trouble of doing all the things _she_ had in their past life. Keeping her from healing the prince would be simple enough, now that he knew when it would occur.

It was time for Page Alan to resurrect himself...but this time around, Page Thom would be around to keep an eye on her.

(And to also make sure that the crown prince, the rogue king, _and _the Shang Dragon all kept their lecherous grubby paws _off _his little sister, under the threat of being turned into spiders_._)


	3. Insanity Runs in the Family

3. Insanity Runs in the Family

'_No pranks_' had been her watchword, from a disgruntled Lady Margaux who was looking marginally ridiculous bundled up in countless comfortable shawls in preparation for the long trip ahead.

"No pranks and no nosing around for trouble, young lady." The sewing mistress had snapped, specifically drawing Alanna aside before they left for the capital. "Mithros knows you do _that_ more than enough, and that you shouldn't have been allowed to leave the convent."

Alanna wouldn't dare, not with Margaux herself in addition to Lady Patience _and_ the First Daughter accompanying the twelve youngest ladies as chaperons on the outing, which was also supposed to provide an 'education experience' on just which stores in Corus provided the best dress materials and baubles for the best prices.

"But trouble follows me, not the other way around, milady." Alanna had blurted out, before she caught herself and hastily slapped her fan over her treacherous mouth.

Going on any further trips to the city was something Alanna didn't want to sit out on punishment, anyhow, because she'd heard of the turmoiling activity there, how everything was at a break-neck pace that was excitement personified to a young lady-in-training who had only known the convent and her rural estate.

But Margaux had only looked mildly irritated at her cheek, and sent her away with a shake of her head and muttered something under her breath that sounded derogatory regarding Alanna's future prospects with men.

As she now stared out the window and the countryside that rolled past, Alanna wondered if she would be able to sneak off to the palace to visit Thom, perhaps in the process watching one of the jousts or fencing duels that the knights and squires in the palace so often engaged in. And which Thom disliked with a cultured, self-righteous vehemence, not wanting to have anything to do with whacking things and falling down, as he put it bluntly in his letters.

It was _his_ own fault for not agreeing with her and going to training at the palace, in Alanna's very well justified opinion.

She had given up on ever completing (at least, in her current life that was) her embroidery of a little humming-bird long ago, preferring to keep her innermost thoughts company instead. The movement of the coach made the view rattle in the window frame, as it and the horses that drew it ran over the bumps and pits that littered the uneven road. Likewise, her needlework was disturbed by the ups and downs, and nary a single stitch she had made in the past few minutes had been straight.

Darkness had fallen, thankfully making sewing impossible, and the other girls were dozing; The itinerary was that they would reach Corus by evening, and spend the night in lodgings provided by one of the girl's parents, who had gladly agreed to host them for the duration of their stay.

"What are you thinking of?" The girl besides her, a lovely blonde in the palest of pinks, whispered in the stillness that had befallen their carriage containing two other girls. She leaned forward, and Alanna watched her light a small candle, bringing her form into focus in the darkened interior and exterior of their surroundings.

"...Me?" Alanna was inwardly irritated at the interruption of her thoughts, although Lady Cythera of Elden was nice enough, being a social creature whose sunny amicability and attractiveness to men were famous in the convent. The existence of every male being, according to her, was to be celebrated, if only because she was a woman. Two years Alanna's senior and in possession of all the prized traits in a girl of that age in addition to ready laughter and a bubbly personality, Cythera was upheld by the mistresses of the convent as a role model. (A role model of a convention that Alanna despised, as she embodied many unsatisfactory elements of femininity that she'd rather ignore.)

The elder girl was not one to enjoy silence, not when there was so much opportunity for 'interesting conversation' regarding dresses and dances and handkerchiefs and the sadly few men that the girls of the convent interacted with on a regular basis.

"Who else? Everyone's sleeping." Cythera whispered chummily, edging closer into the beam of moonlight that fell across their seats. Her face was earnest and intense, her eyes too vibrant. "There's _nobody_ to make small talk with, and I could _never_ fall asleep on journeys. I'm too afraid of the bandits attacking."

Alanna rolled her eyes, knowing full well that she was a last resort with whom Cythera wanted to talk to; Her conversations were, according to the etiquette mistress, boring and showed off her ignorance in just about everything imaginable. The irony was that ladies' conversations were three parts fashion, five parts gossip, and the rest flirtation. That hardly consisted of 'everything imaginable.'

"Well, nothing really." She said wearily, taking in how Cythera looked immaculately daisy-fresh and picture-perfect, as if they hadn't been rattling for two hours in a little cramped wooden box in the direction of Corus.

"You looked as if you were thinking. You do that too much, Sister Margaux says." Cythera said happily, with no trace of reproach at all in the clear, neutral voice that made her a true pleasure to listen to in music class.

"She thinks that a single sweet is too much and would ruin my diet." Alanna said scathingly. She liked sweets, perhaps overly so according to Maude, and didn't adhere in the slightest to the diet that would supposedly enhance her 'growing womanly curves.' Which was preposterous, in her again very much justified opinion. A twelve-year old had no business with melons on her chest, regardless of the opinions of the still young gentlemen whom would be eligible bachelors in a year or so.

"Maybe. And by the way, your rouge is smeared." The other girl said practically, drawing a handkerchief out.

"Don't squirm." She added, dabbing away at Alanna's cheeks with a practiced, skilled hand that Alanna almost envied.

"I didn't ask you to do this for me- I could have done it myself." Alanna muttered sulkily as Cythera took brush and powder to her newly clean face.

"But you wouldn't even have noticed, in the first place. Be quiet-or it'll go on wrong. And I'll have to do it again."

Alanna snorted and shut up obediently, tolerating Cythera's gentle, business-like ministrations with a little sigh.

"...There. I hate it when people don't apply their makeup correctly; It needs to bring out their best features- those violet eyes of yours are quite stunning really. Violet! Mistress Margaux thinks you look like a witch; I think violet eyes are perfectly lovely. Why can't you do them up more? Some kohl to line them, and then the shadow. Or perhaps you can be like Delia and wear violet- she wears green to bring out her eyes-"

Alanna held back retches of disgust; She was not going to imitate _Delia_ of all horrible people, especially when it came to taking fashion cues and color coordinating.

And Cythera didn't seem to need to take breaths when she spoke, Alanna realized. And she certainly wasn't the quiet, demure mask that she presented to all; In fact, she had never met a more talkative and friendly person.

"Thank you anyway." Alanna said dryly, peeking at her handheld mirror, conveniently drawn out of her tapestry bag where she kept all her embroidery.

She was surprised nonetheless at the vision presented to her; Shocked at Cythera's skill to make her-the most unladylike of the new convent girls-look acceptable, if not lovely. The girl peered earnestly into the looking glass, astonished and pleased and yet somewhat anxious. Looking like a true lady on the exterior went both ways: it was certainly flattering to see oneself looking so fine, but at the same time she knew she was turning into what she had always hated.

It went against all of her ideals- to appear so beautiful, so positively feminine, so....vulnerable. Because that was what the aforementioned qualities suggested: subjectivity.

"Don't thank me- I was bored and wanted to do something, really. You just need to know how to apply it right, that's all." Cythera chattered away modestly, waving aside the halfhearted thanks with an elegant arc of a hand. "The mistresses pick on you because you don't take care of your appearance, even if you do look perfectly pretty afterwards."

"Except for Mistress Patience."

"...She's an _angel_, so she doesn't quite count." Cythera pointed out. "And Delia teases you so- the rest of the littler girls who're fresh to the convent like you don't dare to say anything, you know. They think you're perfectly interesting-"

"Oddball, more like."

"-Oh, don't say_ that_." Cythera implored. "_I_ used to dress as if I was color-blind, my first year in the convent. At least you look sensibly drab and not just plain _stupid_ like I did."

'Drab' wasn't a compliment, not that Alanna minded. She'd still rather it be called 'commonsensical,' though.

"I used to pair a lavender silk blouse with a yellow skirt. Pastels, in the dead of winter, would you believe that?"

"Really?" Wide-eyed, Alanna stared at her, feeling as if she had newly discovered a kindred soul where she had looked least for one.

"Truly. Delia made life miserable for me; I didn't make any friends until the music master praised my voice. The convent-fresh girls likewise don't dare try make friends with you, since you're....rather..._unusual_-"

Alanna winced. Cythera was as given to courtly euphemisms- those useless phrases to spare one's feelings-as the gentile normally were.

"-And the fact that Delia's well....Delia. She's a very fine dresser and everyone looks up to her in that aspect, but, still..."

Cythera shrugged, the little undertone of jealousy in her voice prominent in the unspoken criticism of Delia and her ability to recruit cronies wanting to be associated with one of the most beautiful girls in the convent.

Alanna snorted. "Delia is Delia. _That _about sums up everything."

"But, that's uncharitable for me and you to say so."

Alanna gave a wry chuckle; Delia and Cythera had somewhat of a twisted little rivalry occurring between them, something that she had previously thought was reserved between men and even then for competition in fighting. It amused her to no end that women too could duel- in their little remarks, veiled insults, and barely scrutable activities like colors in needlework and learning the newest lace crocheting patterns.

It wasn't a form of dueling that she cared to learn, even if diplomacy would possibly serve her well in the future. A furled fan, a sly cut of doe eyes at person were subtle; A drawn sword wasn't. She preferred the latter.

"No, it isn't. We girls must fight like girls, I guess." The redhead quipped, with the irony not lost. "Since we can't fight any other way."

Cythera wrinkled her delicate, pert little nose with an expression of horror, and Alanna saw a shudder run up her spine. "Oh, no! No, definitely not. Would we ever want to?" She muttered, wringing her gloved hands with true distress. "Getting all _sweaty_ and _baking_ in the sun and _ruining_ our clothes and _falling_ down and _whacking_ away at things...."

Alanna frowned, having just reconciled her image of Cythera and not liking the fact that the model lady too shared the birdbrained mentality of other ladies. Kindred soul or not, Cythera's sensibilities were now a product of convent brainwashing. Was there ever hope for a sane, relatively normal exception? "You sound like my twin brother, Thom."

"...Is that a bad thing?"

"No, not in your book." Alanna grinned, deciding not to mention even in passing that she had been the one who had wanted to be a knight. "Thom doesn't want to be a knight, you see. He'd rather be a sorcerer."

"I wouldn't really want to be either. But if I were a knight, I'd be around handsome, brave, honorable young gentlemen _all _the time." Cythera declared staunchly, a dreamy expression stealing over her fair countenance. "That isn't such a bad thing, is it."

"....Um, if you put it that way."

"But I'd have to be male, then..." It was a pity. Cythera was rather intelligent, at the top of all her classes, and could undoubtedly be capable of so much more other than engaging conversation with young gentlemen.

"Or at the very least pretending to be one." Alanna said darkly, knitting her eyebrows and cursing Thom tenfold in her mind for refusing to go along with her- as he put it, nitwitted- plan.

"True." Cythera sighed. "But then if I were male, other men wouldn't look twice at me. Not unless they were men of that other sort, and that doesn't do a girl any good. Daddy would kill me if I married a gay man who ran around on me with other men during our marriage."

"Doesn't hurt to dream. I'd rather be in the palace then in the convent any day." Alanna growled.

Cythera took it the wrong way. "Of course! All of us want to be presented already. The court's simply too exciting."

No, the convent's sterile monotony wasn't exactly conducive to gaining experiences for conversation material, not when there was so little to actually talk about apart from what they learned in class. And then there was the mental conditioning that occurred...

Alanna didn't think so, and expressed herself as such, giving her embroidery several choice stabs with the point of the needle.

"Don't kill your hummingbird. Sister Margaux will murder you, and you'll have to re-stitch it. You'll understand in a few years, little fire-top." Cythera said practically, relieving her of the needlework. ("_Fire-top? Little?_" Alanna groaned.) "You'll know that-"

They were interrupted by their carriage stopping short, all of a sudden creaking ungracefully to an abrupt, harsh stop that sent Alanna and her companions flying to the forefront, landing in an unladylike heap at the foot of the first seat.

"Ooow." Cythera groaned pathetically, clutching her head where it had made painful contact with the hard wood of the windowsill. A curl tumbled from the restraints of her pins, to settle fetchingly against the soft line of her jaw. "...What's happening?"

Alanna crept near the window, surreptitiously peeking outwards through the filmy curtains to spot shadows, fire, and then- her breath caught in her throat- the cool metallic reflection of the moon on naked, sharpened steel.

Torches, unfamiliar men, and swords- she wasn't so sanguine as to hope that their few convent escorts had stood much of a chance against such a large collection of ruffians, if what she saw was any indicator.

"Careful, lass- They harass travelers and hold 'em for ransom. Especially the nobles." Coram had said grimly to her before she left for the convent, about the Scanran raiders and mountain bandits against whom Trebond was Tortall's first line of defense.

"Shhh." She whispered to her tittering companions, drawing back and quickly extinguishing the candle. "Don't let them hear you."

"It's bandits, right?" Cythera whispered, too loudly, and with a tentative note that bordered upon true fright.

"Unfortunately." Alanna muttered, wishing that she'd brought a dagger or bow, the two weapons she'd been instructed to use by Coram, with her from home. Trebond faced such lowly miscreants overrunning Tortallian borders every year, but that certainly didn't entail that she was comfortable facing them on her own.

At that revelation, the other two girls in the carriage with her and Cythera promptly pulled fainting fits characteristic of noble ladies, whom seemed to always take pleasure in weakness, and in not being mentally present whenever anything traumatic or frightening or of any significance occurred. To her credit, Cythera only looked as if she was about to pass out, but didn't.

The scream that ripped through the tranquility of the night was most definitely Delia's, Alanna realized detachedly, as she watched the first carriage burn and the occupants scramble out. She spotted said girl's trademark emerald green, and heard the hysterics that were overflowing into the night air. The screams, the crying, the praying that would be to no avail- she'd heard it all somewhere.

Then, their own door was opened to the glow of a torch, and a big scruffy bandit filled up the doorway with his massive, muscled bulk. His vest and belt were hung with varying weapons, making him look very much like a walking armory- _for intimidation purposes only_, an unfamiliar, wiser, clearer-minded part of Alanna told her. _There were worser opponents. _

"Hmm, a lot of pretty lasses 'ere, too." The man leered, reaching out towards them with a huge hairy hand that she was just itching to separate from its wrist.

Something within her, the deepest part of her mind, snapped. Later, Alanna would refer to the moment as her "Lioness" awakening for the first time.

There was no variance; _it _was as much her as her Gift was, abet in a sudden, startling, frightening way that defied all reason.

(_Lioness_, she thought grimly, all of a sudden, involuntary and unbidden by anything within her prior knowledge. That Lioness within her, crouching unvalued and undetected in the deepest recesses of herself. Whoever or whatever that was.)

She had no idea just how she just_ knew_, but her right hand clenched into a fist, _thumb over fingers_, and shot out, aiming for the _lower part of the ribcage_ that she just knew would be the best place to hit. A twisting punch, starting palm-up to end palm-down, unlike any she had seen before even from Coram's hand-to-hand. The impact of her blow was fittingly punishing and Cythera shrieked in accordance to the crunch of bone splintering underneath; It sent the man hurtling several feet out of the carriage and bruised the uncallused skin over her _first two knuckles_.

…Mithros.

She was being calm, too calm, too impossibly cool about it all, as if she faced down dangerous strangers seeking to do her harm on a regular daily basis. A tiny little bit of her mental self, the sole part of her that she could possibly recognize at the moment, panicked at how natural it all seemed, how easily her body moved.

Alanna literally trembled at the phantom instincts that ran like an electrifying current through her body, every motion fluid as if it had been ingrained into her by years and years of long practice and, most frighteningly, application. Application, as in the real-life combat that watchful, wary Coram had never in her twelve years let her go near with a twelve-foot pole.

But in an instant she was on the fallen bandit, brutally and unhesitatingly slamming the satin heel of her slippered foot into vulnerably soft nose cartilage. The other two bandits who rushed her met a similar fate, as she went from crushing stomp to flying kick with a speed she didn't know she possessed, and just as quickly as they had pounced, they were lying supine on the floor with broken faces. Wide-eyed, she nearly backed away, although in the next moment the viselike grip of the cold serenity retook her consciousness.

"Who's next?" Alanna breathed softly through clenched teeth, glaring, unafraid, unaware of herself, unaware of anything other than the automatic movements of her limbs and how she couldn't and shouldn't stop them lest one of her companions was harmed.

Her eyes quickly took in the vicinity and the hostages and the captors, and that _other _part of herself which wasn't panicking and from which stemmed her new abilities thankfully did the rest, sparing her sensibilities. Balancing risks and opportunities, allocating where the most effort would be necessary to free the hostages, and writing off the casualties; such cold calculation she couldn't have done merely a day ago.

And then Alanna found herself springing forth and relieving one of the bandits of the sword that hung at his belt, figuring to take the advantage since she stood no chance unarmed and speed was her best asset. The blade slid out of the scabbard easily, and her grip on the hilt had a familiarity that seeped into her bones.

Feeling segregated from her limbs, she swiftly settled into a stance- sideways guard, she thought with confusion, somehow recognizing it as the best to take at the time. Why on earth did she think it was sideways guard?

The answer was swift and brutal and hammered her opponent mercilessly, as the sword snaked out and she brought it down with a sharp rap on bone. Unthinking, she turned, and swept the arcing length of the blade in a half circle meant to cut; When that was repelled, she followed on the heels of the first attack with the second move in the Crescent Moon drill, successfully bringing down yet another opponent.

The nausea at the blood would come later, she pondered blankly, when she was more herself. The stimulus of danger was more than enough to prevent her from musing on that.

Just as she was accustomed to the sight of looking down the long length of steel at an opponent. The sword was too heavy, heavier than Coram's, although she honestly didn't have any clue where that comparison had came from. Or was it just her much-atrophied strength, which was nothing near what it should have been―and just what was that strength in its original glory?―to assume such a stance. And no, she had never really had _that_ sort of necessary strength in all her short life, either. She switched to a double-handed hold, the name of which eluded her mind as did just how she was so informed on swordsmanship.

It was like coming _home,_ after such a long, long time.

And it filled the empty space within her heart with the knowledge that she was no longer weak, that the momentum, that sensual, consistent power lay within her hands, and she knew- or rather, her body knew for some unexplained reason- that she was able to wield it to protect.

Alanna didn't have time, however, to ponder just why her body was so well acquainted with the situation, why her muscles and nerves tingled. The strain was present, as she had none of the previous conditioning that the skills would normally have accompanied; It was an end without a beginning, nor anything in between.

Most of all she couldn't possibly explain it all off as beginner's luck: that intense heady cocktail of confidence and skill to back it that seemed to narrow her vision down to only her sword, and whatever was at the receiving end of it.

"I can't...I can't control it." She whispered frantically, wanting to will away the sudden compatibility with this new part of herself that had never emerged from its cloister eve before to wreak its havoc upon everything she knew.

This lack of self-consciousness, the natural fluidity that seemed to imbue her mind with a calm, cold stillness that seemed so mechanical and painstakingly trained for such life-or-death situations. And worst was that she didn't so much flinch as she dealt blows with the flat of the blade meant to stun and drive away, but never to kill. Never to kill- she grimly latched on to that part of what she suddenly knew she was capable of doing.

"Alanna!"

A grimy hand, fisted in long tumbling golden tresses, yanking back to bare a creamy white throat ringed with pearls. Moondrops. Tears, in the night, Alanna thought. Waxing poetic about the absurdity of what was happening- she with a sword and suddenly taking on a role she'd thought life had assigned to someone else, someone male.

"Drop yer sword. Or your pretty pal 'ere gets 'er lil' white throat slit." The bandit demanded, although her eyes quickly picked up on the anxious trembling of his knees, even as he jerked Cythera's head backwards.

Alanna swore- guardsmen's curses, sailors' curses, knights' curses, even the occasional Bazhir word in a tongue that was smooth and shouldn't have been so smooth on her tongue.

She dropped the hilt from nerveless fingers, waiting for midnight to toll and the death god to arrive. Now that she was still, Alanna could feel her heart beating as if it was about to leap out of her chest.

Cythera's desperate, anguished scream lanced throughout her consciousness, resounding and awakening the fear that she'd tried to hold back, somehow, as if she would truly lose herself if that got loose.

The memories were real― bogeyman memories that weren't hers, that somehow would help her to preserve her own life and those of her companions― but would she lose herself in the process?

Alanna's legs liquidated, feeling the nearly tangible sensation of adrenaline dissipating once the danger was over. Another question to ponder at a later and safer time was the trembling of her musculature, unaccustomed to such a hard workout and yet so intimate with the....fighting skills she'd never acquired or practiced in the first place.

"My body...can't keep up...." She gasped, as if clutching at thin figments of imagination, to persuade herself that it couldn't happen.

And then it came, like lightning.

Orange split the ground, seceded vile heads from torsos, saved the day when she couldn't, wouldn't…because The Lioness within was gone, and Alanna ached with the loss of it.

"Alanna..."

No clue how she got to be lying on the floor. It was muddy, damp, and doing wonders for her complexion. Patience was holding her, cradling her like the child she knew she should be, but somehow wasn't, not when she was the Lioness, whatever that silly title was.

"Eh? What are you talking about?" She was giggling like a lunatic/court lady, the shock of coming down from that dangerous height of instinct overdrive addling her perception of the situation. The sudden mobilization of skills she never knew she had had taken its toil, even if she wasn't quite aware of that, either.

Orange Gift. Orange. She pushed away the healing hands that drifted with precision down to the slash in her shoulder, which hadn't been there a hour or two ago when she was chatting with Cythera. "Dun wanna. Go away."

A heavy sigh, and then the clammy sensation of being spelled by someone who was much more powerful than she was. His Gift pushed back the protesting barriers of her own Gift trying to keep him out, and not quite gently: His Grace was not often a gentle man, as he had said a long time ago.

Orange again, filling her vision, and running through her veins in a slow burn like lead. Orange? Odd color, even though she was one to speak, as her own Gift was purple. Familiar, but with that same slippery elusiveness of when she had been fighting, as if there was something else that she should have known. Or rather, Alanna wasn't sure if she had been actually fighting, or just _dreaming_. Although the soreness of her feeble, convent-softened body belied the latter.

But still, Alanna couldn't forget. Nor could she remember just why she remembered, or just _what_ there was to remember in the first place.

"Oh my." She mumbled, looking at the man who knelt in front of her. Her hand came away from her hurt arm bloody, and she stared at the crimson blossom and swell on her sleeve with a morbid astonishment. "I've really done it now, haven't I?"

"She's in shock from the blood loss." The strange man said, but not to her. A large, powerful hand, working a soothing half-rub on her lower back; Sister Patience offering her water, which she promptly threw back up, on her expensive shawl. Wiping her mouth in disgrace, Alanna looked at the man who had saved their traveling party.

His eyes would have been cardiac arrest inducing, if she had been in the right state to appreciate them and be very, very surprised at how she was able to see the slightest, faintest glimmer of something _not quite right_ in them, lurking about furtively like some dread secret. Conté-blue, sapphire-blue, with a propensity for madness that wasn't quite so evident now, not yet, not for a few years.

…_.Conté-blue? _

Alanna managed to wipe at her face with a fist, grimacing as she felt kohl smear. She peered at Cythera through her lashes, giving her a watery if somewhat inappropriate grin at how the elder girl's painstaking work had all been undone by a little sweat.

"....Sister Margaux is going to kill me." She managed.

The way the blood rushed to her head and she simply limply flopped over senseless would have done any noble lady proud.

* * *

Everyone worth mentioning had proceeded to their rooms to wash up after a particularly grueling practice. Now, if the dratted boy would just be quiet and not draw any attention to himself (and Thom as well, although he had an illusion to thank for concealing his identity), even if there were no spectators in the fencing courts....

"Aaaaahhhhhh!!!!"

"Shut _up_-"

"Aaaaiiiiiiiiiii!!!! It _talks_!!!!!"

"-Malven-"

"It knows my naaaame!!!!"

"You're a sight fit for sore eyes, trying to pick on the disadvantaged. Younger, smaller pages? You're a coward and a bully, and deserve to be punished as such." Thom stated lazily after fencing class one day, when the bully had pulled him aside for a 'private word.'

(Of course, he conveniently forgot that he had many more years than the boy, and was one of the most powerful mages of his former time, and thusly by reasoning couldn't possibly be as vulnerable as he had made himself to be.)

Ralon―that pathetic fool reduced to picking on younger and smaller targets-―emitted one last long melismatic note of distress and collapsed, eyes rolling back in his thick head.

Thom wasn't aware that the human male vocal range extended to such soprano proportions. He calmly extinguished the illusion of a griffin with Duke Gareth's face that he'd conjured up to conceal his human image, taking care to make sure that there were no traces of his characteristically violet-hued Gift lingering about to expose him later. As far as Malven was concerned, a griffin suddenly appeared out of nowhere and attacked him. That was the best that Thom could manage in his present condition, with George refusing to do anything.

"Revenge is sweeter when taken cold." Thom whispered in the dead silence afterwards. Except for the fact that it hadn't worked out for Roger. And Ralon had proved himself to be a very useless pawn in the future, anyhow, as Lady Delia's flawed tool Claw. She certainly didn't have the same taste in schemes as she did in dresses, certainly.

As an afterthought, he took out his flask and emptied the remainder of the water that he hadn't drank at practice over the crotch of Ralon's pants so it'd look as if he wet himself. He was certainly enjoying being ten years old and thusly immune from adult norms of behavior, oh yes.

_You're being a childish bastard._

"Eh?" Thom stared around, blinking owlishly at the empty practice courts, wondering if his time traveling was finally catching up to him and making him sick as Roger's resurrection had.

_Look, damn it. Here. Down here. _The little voice in his head insisted.

"...Mithros. I'm going mad. Not the first time, of course, considering that I let myself be goaded by Delia, but still..." Thom shrugged, despite the fact that his reticence had a quality of denial about it.

_You're not going mad. Look down here. Now, you fuckwit, before I bite you. _

As the disembodied voice was sounding more and more decidedly resentful, Thom decided to humor it. He gave his shoes an exasperated glower, and found that a tiny, golden-brown, _fluffy_ little... _thing_ was perched huffily upon his laces.

"You talk?" He asked, arching an eyebrow at it. It puffed itself and its excessive quantity of fur out in righteous indignation, and Thom stared, fascinated, wondering if that was really a tail and ears that he saw.

_The Goddess isn't the only one to bestow talking familiars upon mortals._

And no, he didn't take interference from otherworldly beings to be self-evident occurrences on a regular basis.

"Faithful." Thom said, comprehending and strangely taking it all in stride better than he thought he would; That was what came about having a most unconventional sister. "You're like Alanna's Faithful, so you can communicate telepathically."

Thom had always wanted to conduct experiments on Faithful, to figure out that particular tendency and what made it tick.

_I'm nothing like that fawning jackass- is that what that damned twin of yours called him, Faithful? She has awful taste in names. _The fuzzball gave what could have passed for a little snort, crawling towards his trouser leg.

"No, you're not climbing up my legs." Thom snapped, grabbing it by its tail and cupping it in his palms before it could squirm away at his rough handling. "And may I ask just which deity did me the honor of bestowing a tiny little ball of fuzz upon me?"

_Silly little boy. I'll assure you that I'm no ordinary furball. _The furball promised vengefully, and Thom saw tiny little teeth and beady little black eyes flash in indignation. _Just whom did you think you were making a pact with, you deranged numbskull? You'd have to expect less odd things than that. _

"The black god, of course." Thom mused, thinking that the furball was certainly calling the kettle black with its proclamation that he was little "It's suffice to say _that's_ how you know about Faithful and my previous life."

_Faithful. Huh. I'll tell you right here and right now that my name is Barnaby, before you get any notions in your head of calling me Fluffy or Fuzzy or some damned inane projection of your own perception of an ideal pet. I'm not a fucking pet, not by any damned definition of the word. _

"Barnaby? Charmed to meet you. I'll have you know that pets are not allowed in the dormitories, not by any extension of the rules." Thom said in an uninspired tone that was lacking in any warmth whatsoever that normally accompanied an introduction. "And I am Thom of Trebond, which you needless to say already know. And would you deign to enlighten me on what you are meant to be, other than something the black god is plaguing me with in this life?"

_ Those girly purple lamps of yours are meant to see wit, stupid. I'm a-_

"Rat. Pika? But they don't live outside of the Bazhir desert territories...A dust bunny? " Thom guessed, stopping in his tracks towards his living quarters. "Or mouse. Or gerbil? Some unfortunate, miniature rabbit. But your ears are not quite of that size..."

_Hamster, you fucking ignoramus. _

"...And the black god sees fit to send me such a little rodent to aid and abet such an ignoramus?"

_Of course not. I will not aid and abet you. You see, that was what I meant in that I differ from the Goddess's fucking lapwarmer. _

"Then why are you here? To torment me?" Thom muttered, thinking that Barnaby did have the same sort of unpleasant personality as Faithful, as if being prickly was a prerequisite to being one of a deity's own.

_Far from it. I'm to keep you alive until you fulfill your end of the entire blasted bargain to the lord of death. _

"And that in some way does not entail aid of any sort?" The page asked disbelievingly.

_I'm not obliged to step in unless you die. And then I resurrect you until you do it damn right the way you're supposed to. _

"So I can die over and over again? And relive everything?"

Barnaby's grin was tiny, sharp-toothed, and nearly predatory. _Unfortunate, isn't it. I can wonder how damned right painful it could sometimes, dying then being resurrected only to die again. It'd be best if you kept this to yourself- it's not something to reveal to your worst enemies. Cowardly nancy boys like Ralon would likely want to kill you for every time you set an illusion on him, the little twat. _

Thom grimaced, remembering that said nancy boy did possess enough brute force on his part to beat him to death.

_ I suppose the black god wanted to cure you of your.... sanguine outlook towards reliving events._ _He found it most amusing. _Barnaby stated, waving a little paw around dismissively. _You're stupid, y'know. _

He hadn't quite thought of it anyway like that. "And your role in my second life is, other than sticking around...?" He prompted.

_I merely observe you, really. And when you die, the Black god will allow me to eat your soul. In which case, I'd really appreciate if you'd just start a nuclear war and fucking keel over already. _

"I beg your pardon?"_ …Nuclear war? _Thom was not quite sure if that was a reference that was supposed to highlight his ignorance, or just something that Barnaby pulled out of thin air.

_You heard me, damn it. Waste of saliva to repeat it. _The hamster said crudely. _Since you lived twice, you are unnatural. And therefore your soul cannot go to the black realms like ordinary folk's. In which case, it goes in my stomach. _

_ "_...That is interesting...reasoning." Thom turned an unflattering shade of dark mauve. "Can't I just drop you off the Needle and call it an accident when I see the Black god next?"

_...Fuck you. _

"I'd thought that'd be the case. And watch your language." Thom said mournfully, giving Barnaby several disapproving pats right on top of his little golden head, grinding his index finger into the fur vengefully in an strange imitation of one of Raoul's painful hair-rufflings as Barnaby snapped his teeth at him.

_I've been talking like this for the past few goddamn centuries. If the Black god doesn't mind, why the hell should you?!_

Inwardly, Thom lamented: He wasn't quite sure if it was a direct insult to his masculinity or just a sick sense of humor on the Black god's part that he was sent a little fluffball as his familiar. A tiny, seemingly useless little thing (that swore and insulted too much) that did not even possess useful appendages like the claws that Faithful had used to assert his position as his master's loyal guard.

_I'm actually quite useful, believe me. _Barnaby said, matter-of-factly before Thom realized that it could hear his thoughts.

"Get out of my head. Now. Or I'll give you to the palace cats as a plaything- they're awfully fond of soft little rodents that go squish between their claws."

_Once you feed me. _Barnaby relented with no good humor, settling in where Thom's wrist met his sleeve, shuffling in between cloth and flesh to conceal himself. _Dark, leafy greens are acceptable- that's what hamsters in your realm usually eat, I think. But I'll take strawberry shortcake if you can get it. _

Thom proceeded to his rooms instead of the kitchen, and received a fanged nip for his efforts.

Later, as Barnaby nibbled a nest from a sweater of his, Thom reflected on future plans. The active interest of the guardian of death indicated that perhaps there was more to his second life than even he had anticipated. The Gift: so fittingly named, because it truly was a blessing from the heavens and hells, because of its potential.

His coming back in time to wrought change was something he viewed in the same light. Change meant chaos in a contained way when brought about by himself; It provided disadvantages and advantages, and this time he knew enough about _what could have been_ to take the advantages. And there were no external forces that he didn't know of that could wreak havoc on his plans, as long as he didn't bring any into the equation like that Myles of Olau, who had loved Alanna like a daughter but whose personality he couldn't personally stand.

However, at the moment, Thom's most immediate concerns consisted mostly of escaping Malven's bullying attentions, and _then_ changing history as he knew it.

Even then, he'd still have to keep certain familiar aspects of his original future in the picture if not to maintain his twin and by extension her friends as potential allies, then also for his reference.

_You sure 'bout it? Bringing your twin to the palace with you?_

Thom looked at Barnaby and snatched the remnants of his sweater away. "Are you doubting my plotting skills?"

_Nope, just your sanity. _Barnaby sniffed, indignant. _She'd be twice the friggin' knight that you'll be. _

"She's an adequate ally. That is, Alan the Page, not The Lioness. The Lioness would be my enemy; Alanna will never become that Lioness of the last life, not under my influence. So I have to keep an eye on her." Thom sighed. "I don't think I can go through training without her help, anyhow."

Barnaby shrugged, and chowed down on the apple Thom had reserved for a midnight snack. _That may be, but dead women make bad allies. Just remember that, kiddo, just remember that. _


End file.
